Assessing the Anthropogenic Impact on West Indian Coral Reefs

Halftime Seminar

Hadrien Gourlé

September 27, 2018

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystem on the planet.

They face great challenges and their population is rapidely declining.

Can research help?

Where?

What?

  • Monitor the health of coral reefs using bacterial communities
  • Characterize the relationship between corals and their microbial environment

Survey of the field

Literature review

The workflow

13 metabarcoding studies

13 metabarcoding studies

But…

what do they do?

Whole metagenome Sequencing

WMS - The workflow

Which one works best?

No independant, comprehensive and extensible benchmarks of taxonomic classifiers exists yet

Which one works best?

doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty390

Applying WMS to coral reef communities

Surrounding the reef

Ultra-deep sequencing of sediment and water samples in close proximity of coral reefs

A dive in the coral reef microbiome

TODO